If all students started doing really well on the standardized tests, the tests would probably be considered less valid and therefore, less reliable. Test creators would be forced to change the test so that a bell curve would reemerge. I recognize that standardized testing success does not demonstrate a complete expression of learning, and that the act of answering multiple choice questions well is not an enduring life skill, but since the tests reflect the content, the tests do provide enough feedback to create an academic passage. Although students are required to go through the standardized testing process, they move on from the tests whether they do well on them or not.

Students must display a degree of creative application to demonstrate learning in all topics that are more than training, and it is difficult to assign statistical results to creative application. So the portions of the content that standardized tests evaluate so well with high validity and reliability are an incomplete assessment of the student’s learning. Teachers can use strategies to make their formative classroom assessments reasonably valid and reliable, but the narrative of learning looses value in a straight-jacket. Well crafted rubrics serve as the best attempt to make each student’s unique application to the content valid and reliable. While valuable to a point, standardized tests need to be viewed in concert with data that captures more authentic manipulation of the content that is not as easily numerated.